Vice President Mugabe?

So if you’ve been following the election news, you know that after the KY and OR primaries made it all but official that Obama would be the Democratic nominee, Sen. Clinton toned down her scorched-earth rhetoric. She also, according to reports, started privately assuring big donors and party officials that she would work to unite the party behind the nominee.

You’ll also know that something changed in the last couple of days. Suddenly, Sen. Clinton is scorching the earth again. Yesterday, I think, in Florida, she compared the disqualification of that state’s delegates to the election rigging and election ignoring of Pres. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, a well known criminal regime.

One might reasonably be led to ask: wha’ happ’n’d?

Is it possibly this? Certainly seems plausible. On the other hand, maybe it’s just this, which seems equally plausible. On yet a third hand, maybe she really believes Obama can’t win the general because America is still that racist.

Or maybe it just doesn’t matter. Maybe all that really matters is that she’s damaging her own party and her party’s nominee in the pursuit of no meaningful goal, it being the case that she simply doesn’t have the votes to be the nominee and isn’t going to get the votes to be the nominee. That’s where I am, anyway. I simply do not care what’s in her head any more. She’s a political Katrina: powerful, unpredictable, and highly damaging, and all we can do until she blows herself out is watch the spectacle.

The main difference, of course, is that she’s doing this willfully, whereas Katrina was just a dumb, unguided, random storm.

Unless you ask John Hagee.

Edited to add:

“The race for the Democratic nomination—”race” is hardly the right word, is it?—now feels like a quantum physics problem: How long can a body exist in a state approximating motionlessness without actually stopping?” – John Dickerson, Slate (via Sullivan).

Which, unless I’m mistaken, would make Sen. Clinton a Bose-EinsteinCondensate, which opens up a whole new set of possibilities: superfluid super-delegates who can escape Obama even when he thinks he has them bottled up, slowing the speed of light so that we can’t see who the nominee is until some point in the far distant future, etc.

20 Responses to “Vice President Mugabe?”

pathetically enough, i ate up that bose-eistein condensate link. to me, that’s way more interesting than politics. and i don’t really even like science that much, and i understand it even less. yet i’m more interested in really cold atoms than i am in hearing whatever clinton or obama or mccain will say today.

Excellent. Thanks. I’ve perused his blog before, but not in a long time and, to be honest, I’d kinda forgotten about it.

I’m not sure there’s really any numbers involved in this kind of physics. Other than Absolute Zero, which is an easy one. I mean, quantum states are pretty non-numeric, and you had an excellent teacher when you were first introduced to them. You should be golden.

I went back and forth on that one while I was reading it. Parts of it were great. Parts of it were blah. An interesting concept for a book, but I didn’t really enjoy it enough to recommend it. It hasn’t stuck with me. Not nearly as good as Little, Big.

Daemonomania, I believe. It’s one of his Aegypt novels — a quartet. The last one just came out . . . what . . . last year? the year before? Something like that. I haven’t read any of them, but a lot of people seem inordinately devoted to them. Not as devoted as people are to Little, Big, but let’s face it, that’s not a normal book.

Honestly, it’s been so long since I signed up for the 25th-ann. edition, I don’t even remember which one I got. It was the cheapest one. Is that signed, or just a normal special edition? I dunno. It’s definitely not the handwritten one. Those were, like, $400.

I did read The Translator, and liked it quite a lot. It’s a very unusual novel for him in that it’s a very normal story. Just normal people doing normal stuff. Well, there’s poetry, but aside from that.

Yeh….there are the emails, which actually turn out to be kind of an interesting part of the book, toward the end. The woman who discovers Byron’s novel hasn’t spoken with her dad in years and years and so they do a bit of emailing. That was the thing with that book — each of the different storylines, well, they’d be interesting for a while, but then they’d get old. And they didn’t really work well together — the whole thing of a novel within a novel within a novel didn’t do it for me.

[…] which all cognitive function stops. Or if it’s not absolute stupid, it’s at least a Bose-Einstein condensate of stupid: a state of intelligence in which all meanings converge into a single quantum state and […]